About the Author
Pioneering oncologist, researcher, and award-winning science writer Siddhartha Mukherjee is one of the world’s premiere cancer researchers. He is the author of The New York Times bestselling and Pulitzer Prize winning book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, a groundbreaking work that charts the history of cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. It was named one of the 100 most influential books of the last 100 years by Time magazine and was adapted into a PBS documentary by filmmaker Ken Burns.
He is also the author of The Laws of Medicine and The New York Times bestselling The Gene: An Intimate History, which brings to life the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices. His newest book, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans. With writing that is vivid, lucid, and suspenseful, Mukherjee’s third book is an extraordinary exploration of what it means humans.
In both his writing and his keynote talks, Mukherjee weaves science, social history, and personal narrative to illustrate the many medical breakthroughs that have shaped our society and offers a glimpse of what the future might hold for us as well.
Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff physician at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. A Rhodes Scholar, Mukherjee graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. He has published articles in The New Yorker, The New England Journal of Medicine, The New York Times, Nature, and others. He lives in New York with his wife and daughters.
Raves and Reviews
Mukherjee found an especially roomy subject for his roving intelligence…I was repeatedly dazzled by…the enthusiasm of his explanations…the immediacy of his metaphors.”
— Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review
If you are not already in awe of biology, The Song of the Cell might get you there. It is a masterclass.”
— Suzanne O’Sullivan, The Guardian
This volume should earn Mukherjee a rightful place alongside Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, and Stephen Hawking in the pantheon of our epoch’s great explicators.”
— Boston Globe
This is perhaps the greatest detective story ever told a millennia-long search, led by a thousand explorers, from Aristotle to Mendel to Francis Collins, for the question marks at the center of every living cell. Like The Emperor of All Maladies, The Gene is prodigious, sweeping, and ultimately transcendent. If you’re interested in what it means to be human, today and in the tomorrows to come, you must read this book.”
— Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See
The Gene is a magnificent synthesis of the science of life, and forces all to confront the essence of that science as well as the ethical and philosophical challenges to our conception of what constitutes being human.”
— Paul Berg, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
In the Media
October 13, 2023
“A cell biologist shares the wonder of researching life’s most fundamental form”
November 21, 2022
“Siddhartha Mukherjee Finds Medical Mystery — and Metaphor — in the Tiny Cell”
November 13, 2022
“What Can Odd, Interesting Medical Case Studies Teach Us?”
July 17, 2018
“All the Carcinogens We Cannot See”
December 11, 2023
“Why Does the Pandemic Seem to Be Hitting Some Countries Harder Than Others?”
February 22, 2021
“What the Coronavirus Crisis Reveals About American Medicine”
April 27, 2020
“‘Why Aren’t We All Bacteria?’ Siddhartha Mukherjee Explores the Power of Cells”
October 31, 2022
October 22, 2022
“The Gene: Science’s Most Powerful—and Dangerous—Idea”
July 24, 2016
